Yes, it's like this. Depressingly so. I used to work 3-month contracts, broken up by 9 month roadtrips, so coming back to the office I'd be stoked to get back

Yes, it's like this. Depressingly so. I used to work 3-month contracts, broken up by 9 month roadtrips, so coming back to the office I'd be stoked to get back to writing code, with months of pent-up energy ready to burst out in the form of productivity. On two occasions, I took over projects from another developer who had been working on them the entire time I'd been away, and rebuilt them from scratch in less than a week. While it's certainly possible that I'm 100x-500x as productive as those guys, more likely is that they'd simply been coasting along that whole time. It took a lot of diplomacy not to rock that particular boat. "Uh... yeah... it must be this new technology that's just so darn efficient. Certainly not any fault of the team or anything... Say, did you catch the game last night?"